Week End

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For the time of week, see weekend.

Le weekend is a 1967 black comedy film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and lensed in color by Raoul Coutard. When it was first shown in France, it was recommended that viewers be 18 years old or older. The advice still stands.

Plot

A bourgeois French married couple, Roland and Corrine (he is in his forties and she is in her late twenties) find themselves short on funds, and though they have been poisoning the wife's wealthy parents every Saturday for years, they find themselves lacking the inheritance they most certainly do not deserve, and resolve to drive to the countryside where her parents live to borrow some more money.

The movie begins in a neatly arranged upstairs apartment, darkened but for the light that shines into Roland and Corinne's apartment, framed against the brightly lit window. A few questions here and there from the husband evoke a long and boring story from the wife. Below the window outside is the parking lot. It appears that they have been enjoying an open marriage where ménages à trois are commonplace.

Fight in the parking lot

Aside from an initial aerial shot over a parking lot where people fight over a car, the movie is shot more or less conventionally from the perspective of a camera mounted to a dolly.

One of the first gags in the movie relates to the parking lot. Although the parked vehicles are all well-made and tidily-parked, the husband hops in his car, revs up the engine, and throws it into reverse. Hardly 10 meters behind him, his car hits another car. A young boy dressed like an Indian and armed with a bow and arrow witnesses the collision and yells for his parents. The boy's mother runs out of the apartment building and demands an exchange of "particulars." The driver refuses, arguing (in French), "It's not much of a bump, and that's what bumpers are made for - bumps - it's ordinary wear and tear - nothing to worry about." The woman's husband then emerges from the building, at first with a handgun, and then - miraculously - with a hunting rifle, but our "heroes" are already speeding away from the scene as the man fires off several rounds.

The great traffic jam

A little before noon, the couple become entangled in a nightmarish traffic jam, one which seems to foretell the entire collapse of industrialized Western society. Their progress on an unusually narrow country road is hindered by a row of cars in varying degrees of distress. The situation appears to be exacerbated by the decisions of the government to recognize the privileges of a few (a landed aristocracy) at the expense of the many (the motorists, all seeking to escape a bad situation getting worse). A long, ten minute take reveals the chaos of the traffic jam. It is so bad that somehow, somewhere along the line, some of the cars even got reversed in places, so there was no certain way of knowing which direction the traffic is supposed to be going. In this scene, it appears that hundreds of cars, perhaps one or two thousand, have been employed. Although the country road may be ten feet wide, there are beautiful expanses of empty farm land just a foot or two away from the road. The viewer cannot help but ask himself, "Why not make inroads through the farmer's fields and drive there, bypassing whatever is jamming up the road?" And in apparent answer to this question, our heroes have decided to leave niceties behind, and drive on the left hand side of the road.

Whatever the advantages are to allowing aristocracies the pleasure of having wide, wide fields separated by narrow, narrow roads it is lost on the viewer when it becomes clear that modern society has exceeded the bounds that history has accorded it.

Picking up hitchhikers

Approximately 27 minutes into the film, the couple appear to have picked up a couple of hitchhikers that cannot be seen but for the sleeves, one's being of red fabric and the other blue. These are colors that are arguably patriotic colors - taken from the colors for the American or French flags. The hitchhikers prove difficult to get along with: they trade vulgar epithets, and Roland asks the other man if he had sex with his wife, would that count as a scratch? This non sequitur appears to be the result of a missing scene that was deleted during editing. With the camera trained on Roland (behind the wheel) and Corinne (in the passenger seat), the dispute boils over into ever angrier exchanges, hands and arms clawing each other and grabbing at the drivers in front. Corinne and Rolland find themselves having to bite the hands and arms to make them let go.

A few minutes later (about 30 minutes into the movie), the man and wife again find themselves in the company of hitchhikers, but this time the tables are turned, as superior force is employed to enforce the relationship. A man wearing a rain jacket and a woman, his consort, wearing a short red skirt, force Roland and Corinne to turn around and drive back the way they were coming, all at the point of a gun he'd kept hidden under his poncho.

Becoming hitchhikers

Bad, careless driving soon changes their luck when Roland collides into two cars and they miraculously crawl out from under the wreckage. Although they survive the collision, Corinne is overwrought with grief for losing her designer brand Hermes handbags. So where formerly they were well-off bourgeoisie, they are now transformed into down-and-out hitchhikers as a result of Roland's bad driving.

On foot now, they are glad to get a ride from anyone. When a garbage truck comes by they accept a ride in the back with the garbage, provided they pick up all of the garbage on the rest of their route. Even as impromptu sanitation workers, they are poor workers, spilling the garbage they bring back to the truck.

Inaction in action

On arrival at the farm town of Oinville (Wineville), Roland and Corinne wait for a musical interlude to conclude before going on with their task of borrowing from Corinne's parents. The interlude is real in that an actual baby grand piano has been brought in and stationed before the main barn, and a real pianist has been put to the task of playing a classical composition for the benefit of the townspeople. A woman stands to the side of the pianist, turning the scoresheets as he plays. The camera makes wide panning circles around the center of the farm town, first turning clockwise a couple times, and then reversing and turning counterclockwise, showing a handful of people standing around, leaning on posts, or maybe sitting, waiting for the music to end. While this goes on, an authority figure declares that all modern music - including that of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles has its roots in classical music. As the camera continues to pan around it eventually comes to rest on a sign placed on the piano. The piano is for sale. What makes this peculiar is that piano sales could possibly be directed to the farm folk or that a manufacturer could possibly have thought that that was a good place to set up shop and sell them there.

Revolutionary cells

Aside from inexplicable characters like Saint-Just and Emily Bronte, protagonists Roland and Corinne, now mere pedestrians, have somehow taken a wrong turn and have begun to hike through a forest trail. At a family picnic they encounter a radical youth group come out of the woods to bushwhack them and steal their picnic baskets at gunpoint. Following the gang on their retreat, the couple learn that the members are part of a radical revolutionary cell encamped on the shore of a forest lake. Standing on the shore, the leader recites an ode to the Ancient Ocean and delivers it like a prayer, much as the ancient Celts, Greeks or Romans must have worshipped Poseidon or Neptune.

Famine and cannibalism

But the revolutionaries are famished as civilization has collapsed, and the viewer sees that modern society is beginning to return to a more primaeval condition. Apparently in response to eminent starvation, the radicals resort to cannibalism, preying on the meat and goods of tourists fallen prey to their predations, and upon anyone else unlucky enough to have been found near their forest. Although civilization has collapsed, the radicals attempt to maintain contact by shortwave radio with other cells around the world, employing as code names titles of movies like Battleship Potemkin or Johnny Guitar.

Producers attempted to limit the director's art

During the filming of Week End, Godard ran into numerous conflicts with his producers, and each time they came up with suggestions on how to save money, he angrily retaliated by buying new cars off the assembly line and smashing them for the sake of the movie.

As can be seen in the movie, new cars were employed purely for the purpose of mangling; rusty old cars from junkyards were not used when brand new cars could be brought in, and smashed instead. Most of the cars littering the countryside were bought brand new, and smashed for the sake of the movie.

The movie is filled with horrific violence, political soliloquies, and random-seeming sounds and edits. Godard did not make another narrative film for several years afterwards. For some, Le weekend represents an apex (or nadir) which he never reached again.

Cast

• Mireille Darc as Corinne
• Jean Yanne as Roland
• Paul Gégeauf as Pianist
• Jean-Pierre Léaud as Saint-Just
• Blandine Jeanson as Emily Bronte
• Yves Afonso as Tom Thumb

External links

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